If you’re wondering how to get organic traffic to your website, this post is for you. Organic traffic is free traffic which is perhaps why it’s so appealing. When you’re paying for traffic, you want that traffic to convert into sales and revenue. When it doesn’t do that it feels like you’re simply throwing money away!
But with organic traffic any sales you make from your website is a bonus. It’s pure profit once you’ve done all the hard work! The downside about organic traffic is that it comes at a price too – hard work and consistent content creation and promotion.
But before you rush in a start creating content on your website, there’s a couple of important things you should know. Firstly, you don’t want to be bringing the wrong kinds of visitors to your website. You want buyer traffic and that means you want to craft very specific pieces of content which attract that kind of website visitor. So first, define your audience. Who do you want to attract and what kind of information are they looking for?
Spend some time on the customer avatar worksheet pdf which will help you identify the kind of person you want to land on your website. Think about the content they want to find and start there. After all, with all the work you’ll be putting in, you want buyers, not tyre kickers!
How To Get Organic Traffic To Your Website – The Search Engines
Once you’ve identified your target audience (customer avatar) you might want to consider how your content will be found. Ideally you will want some organic traffic coming from the search engines: Google, Bing, Duckduckgo, Yahoo etc. This can be a challenge whatever your niche and particularly in a very competitive one. But to give yourself a better chance of ranking your content, you can find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty in your niche.
The top searched for keywords in any niche are super competitive. You’ll struggle to rank any of your articles for the most competitive keywords. So instead, you can go for the “low hanging fruit”. These are the keywords in your niche which have the fewest competing websites/webpages.
As such you have a stronger chance of ranking your content for them. So for example, if I wrote an article titled “affiliate marketing”, my chances of ranking that title for it’s keyword are zero! However, if I choose a long tail keyword such as “step by step affiliate marketing for beginners pdf” for example, it has a much higher chance that I’ll rank it on one of the search engines and get free traffic.
Nothing is guaranteed with the search engines and particularly Google. They will change their algorithms regularly. But if you create high quality content for those type of keywords, your chances of a ranking on page one of the search results are vastly improved.
How To Get Organic Traffic To Your Website – Social Media
Another important strategy for getting free traffic is social media: Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, X, etc. By sharing your content on social media sites, and finding people who are likely to be interested (and connecting with them), you can quite quickly lead people to your content through your social media presence.
In the case of social media, a good title can make all the difference. You can find currently trending articles which have gone viral using a website called Buzzsumo.com. Buzzsumo shows you trending content and that’s useful because you can identify headlines which have gone viral . Then, use them for ideas for your own content.
See also 10 article headline examples which went viral here. A catchy title is much more likely to result in views and shares than one which doesn’t elicit any emotion or interest.
How To Get Organic Traffic To Your Website – Creating Content
Now you have some idea about how you might get some free traffic, you can start to investigate some content creation ideas. Ideally choose a topic you are interested and/or passionate about. It’s much easier to create content in a topic you love as opposed to one in which you have zero interest. You’ll also need to create a lot of content.
Blogging can take months before you see the light at the end of the tunnel. Take small steps initially and build momentum over time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Your website won’t be suddenly overflowing with visitors after just one blog post either!
Choose your title and get a plugin which helps with your SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. Whether your blog post ranks or not, it’s worth doing this for the overall SEO score of your site as a whole anyway. I use a plugin called Yoast SEO and it helps you identify where to use your keyword in your articles.
Ideally write at least 1000 words in each piece of content to give your content the best chance. Make it of high quality so it stands the test of time! Make a habit out of creating content regularly, at least a few times a week over several months.
Blog Promotion
Promoting your content needs to become second nature too. Unless you actively promote your blog posts, you are effectively relying on the search engines to rank them, which might not happen.
In any case, a new website will be “benched” from the search engines for a few weeks at a minimum. It simply won’t rank a new site, even if the content is great! So you won’t see any “hits” on your website unless you start promoting your content as you write it.
You can do this in a number of ways:
- Post your content on your social media accounts
- Link to your content from other websites (blog commenting, guest posting)
- Send new content to your email list (get an email list if you don’t have one already)
- Use question and answer forums/websites to link to your content (see using Quora to drive traffic)
- Encourage visitors to like and share (use a social media share plugin)
- Build your email list with an attractive “opt in” offer through your blog posts
There’s various tools and plugins you can find to help you do this too. A good one is called Revive Old Posts which lets you syndicate older content throughout your social media presence automatically. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress.
Expectations
While at first it can be an adventure blogging, it can get tiresome pretty quick if you don’t see much in the way of a response and you’re doing it only for the outcome. If your motivation is intrinsic, and you enjoy the process, you’re much more likely to succeed in the longer term.
Keep in mind that your content is going to attract a very specific audience so not everyone will be interested in it. That’s good though because you only want targeted traffic to your site. Those are the people who will also be interested in your product/s (if you have carefully aligned your topic with your target audience/customer avatar).
If you have chosen a topic you are unfamiliar with, or have little interest in then this is going to be a much longer journey. So make sure you pick a topic you enjoy! Chances are good that this will take some time and dedication. Look for the small wins and keep going.
Blogging will take at least a few weeks/months of consistency before you start to see any traction in terms of website visitors. Leads and sales will naturally take even longer since only a small percentage of visitors will sign up to your email list, and a smaller percentage will buy your product/s.
Get a stat counter on your website so you know how many visitors you are attracting week by week.
Summary
Many bloggers start with high hopes only to ditch their blogs down the road. For real success in generating organic traffic to a blog you must have a long term view. If you only want the outcome, it’s likely you won’t sustain the necessary effort for long enough to get traction.
I now have over 800 blog posts on this website and here’s a snapshot of the daily hits on this website since 2019. Keep in mind though that affiliate marketing is a hugely competitive topic. So if you are in another niche, it might be an easier journey.
Other things which will determine your success are your intrinsic motivation to create more and more content. “The man who enjoys walking goes further than the man who wants to get somewhere”. If you enjoy the process, you’ll likely stick with it much longer than most, and have a greater chance of success.
I haven’t always been consistent with my blogging, (or of the promotion of my posts), so that’s definitely a consideration too. I hope you’ve enjoyed this post. If so please share it!
Good luck!